After miscalculating mileage in a big square state yet again, I had the beginnings of a massive tension headache by the time I hit Topeka from the far western reaches of Kansas, nearly 400 miles of gripping a 42-year-old steering wheel in high plains winds. So as I passed Topeka for the last 15 miles into Lawrence and saw the big, green, federally funded interstate reminder of the KU men's basketball Jayhawks' successful 2008 run, I gritted my teeth and resolved to dig my dirty Davidson T-shirt out of the trunk for my the duration of my stay here. That'll show 'em. It helped that George Thompson '84 had earlier said by phone that he proudly wore his Davidson shirt during that tournament, even tho' he is employed at KU. Anyway, a spritz of Drakaar Noir at my Motel 6 did a fair job of masking the gasoline and other fumes embedded in the wrinkled gray athletic T that I had found behind the spare tire, and off we went for a libation on Massachussetts St., the heart of Jayhawks territory.
Wildcat avatar on Massachussetts St., Lawrence, Kansas, 2009
George and his wife Ann Marie have two young kids in their gracious home on Indiana St., blocks from their work, his at KU teaching psychiatry (among several other professional outlets), hers in counseling psychology downtown. Blond-haired Seth is on a sofa with his relatively new little sister from Nepal, Tarajampa, who is adorable and shy. Over a local brew and some chile con queso, George muses that even as far back as Davidson, he thought he would like to have one biological child and then adopt. It was a course in Malthusian econ taught by the late Dr. Louise Nelson that got him thinking about his role in the population of the world. And lo, it came to pass that two children were born a world apart and now sit on a sofa together in Lawrence, Kansas, clearly happy and loved.
But just what do we mean by happy and loved? George continues to plumb life's existential questions for answers. He teaches a program called Avatar, and sees patients from teenagers in group homes to institutionalized schizophrenics. Mainstreaming psychiatric patients through programs that allow more independent living are one of the biggest changes he's seen, since a trip to Paraguay in medical school convinced him to begin looking at new ways to help people, with and without mental problems, to be more independent. One challenge with the approach is that the programs that allow a safe, more independent life for patients outside of institutions cost as much as the institutions. Still, progress moves forward.
In the other direction toward the historical past, George's Kansas roots run back five generations, about as far back as you can go, he says, without being Native American. His mother was born in Goodland, Kansas (where I had spent the night before in a Motel 6), then she moved to Texas at an early age. But family stories abound of the great-great-ancestor killed by Indians in the mid-19th century, of the great-grandfather who made an annual, weeklong trek by wagon team to Kansas City, for supplies. Even in George's neighborhood, Old West Lawrence, he can point to the one 19th-century house that was not destroyed by Quantrill's Guerillas on Aug. 21, 1863, a culminative attack in the vicious disagreements over slavery in Kansas.
But Kansas entered the Union as a free state, by God, and it remains so. Even for Wildcats on Massachussetts St.
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